People hunt through debris in Port-au-Prince Photograph: KPA/Zuma / Rex Features

A large crowd had gathered outside the presidential palace in the centre of Port-au-Prince. From a distance, set against the white stucco of Haiti's most majestic building, it looked like busloads of tourists come to ogle at the changing of the guard. But as you got closer it became clear that this was not a sedate, stately gathering.

The first shock was the sight of the building itself. Its domes had caved in, each at its own bizarre angle, lending the palace the dishevelled look of a drunken nun in her vestments. Then the mass of people outside the palace shifted into focus, queuing up in neat lines at the presidential gates. A Red Cross van was parked on the other side of the barrier, though no basic necessities appeared to be emanating from it. Still the people queued.

When they grew aware that there were some foreign journalists in their midst, they surrounded us. "I want you to listen to us! Stop! Just listen to what we have to say!" shouted one particularly agitated man dressed in a white shirt.

We stopped, and we listened.

"It has been four days since this thing," the man, Jean-Claude Hilaire, began. "And nobody has come yet. My area, Bel Air, is devastated. About 200,000 people have lost their homes. Twenty thousand – kids, pregnant women – are sleeping hungry in the local park. That's long enough. I need to know: is anybody coming? Is anybody going to do anything?"

Hilaire's anger spoke for itself, but who did he direct it against? "I am very angry with Obama. We are the first black people who put an end to slavery. We need the first black president of the US to help us – not in four days, not in five or 15. Now."

Standing beside him, Joseph Marc-Antoine spoke at less volume but with equal force. He is now living on the street, he explained. He eats when he has enough Haitian dollars to buy food, and worries about his brothers who live in other parts of the city and from whom he has had no communication.

"The international community has done nothing. We need drugs. We need drinking water. We can still hear people shouting from the rubble. The smell is not good. Of dead people."

Driving down to the centre of town from the outlying hills, the scale of the tragedy gradually revealed itself. It began several miles outside Port-au-Prince, where a house had imploded incongruously like an empty crisp packet. All the other houses around it were still standing and unscathed. Yet as we drew closer to the city the frequency of the collapsed houses picked up, from every 10th house to every fifth and then second, until finally we passed entire neighbourhoods that had slid down the hill. Earthquake turns into landslide.

About a mile from the presidential palace we came across the first body. Gender unknown, it was wrapped entirely in blue cloth and strapped to a stretcher made of cardboard. It had been left, perhaps as a statement, perhaps merely for logistical reasons, on a street corner under an advertising hoarding for a drinks company. A stream of people heading up the hill, some carrying suitcases in evident flight from the destroyed city centre, passed by the corpse without a glance. Four days in, the sight of a body lying on the street in broad daylight no longer seems to possess the power to shock.

Marching in the other direction were pall-bearers carrying on their shoulders similarly flimsy looking stretchers. This time, the women they bore were living, though barely. They were heading in the direction of hospitals that are overstretched and under-resourced.

A few blocks down, a side street had been turned into a makeshift morgue with up to 30 bodies laid out side by side on the gravel. Further out, towards the waterfront, there were reports that the piles of dead bodies had begun to fuse with the mounting anger of the ­living. According to reporters, some of the piles had been moved into more prominent locations in what appeared to be a macabre statement of billowing frustration.

Everywhere there were the symbols and language of death. Driving into the city, we followed a team of foreign ­rescue workers with a kennel at the back to house their sniffer dog. It was marked "cadavers".

The carnage has not discriminated. From the presidential palace to shacks, from the houses of the rich on top of the hill to the poor quarters at their feet, every­thing and everyone has succumbed to the force of the quake. A hospital for children had concertinaed, its little charges presumably still inside. Only the wooden front doors of the building are standing.

Nor were wealthy foreigners immune. At the Montana hotel, one of the most exclusive in the city, high up on the hillside, a team of French firefighters were inching their way into a tunnel they had carved in the side of the imploded building. Five days ago it had been one of the plum attractions of this deeply troubled city – a spanking new high-rise hotel with all mod cons. Though its high-rise nature now looks distinctly unwise.

The French rescue workers had managed to perform one of those miracles of these dreadful scenes. They succeeded in pulling out four Americans alive – two who had been lucky enough to be in the hotel's lift at the second the earthquake struck, providing them with an air pocket and an escape route, and two others who were in the reception area.

Though death was the dominant theme through Port-au-Prince's shattered streets, the will for survival boomed out everywhere we went. Improvisation – always the primary skill in poor countries such as Haiti – has gone into overdrive. Blue plastic sheets have been turned into tents on the streets, a spouting water hydrant becomes a communal shower, leaves plucked from the weeds growing wild on the verges of the roads are used as a poultice to heal the smashed leg of a boy. Directly opposite the presidential palace the formal gardens that had been designed as manifestation of national pride have become a vision of its desperation, packed full of families ­living on the ground with only sheets above their head.

An extended family of about 20 people, largely women and children, is living in one such improvised home a stone's throw from the caved-in glory of the palace. Among them is seven-year-old Marie, who has a soiled bandage wrapped around her head. When the family's home collapsed, she was inside but was small enough to be pulled out. Her mother, Souvenir, was not so fortunate. Her relatives retrieved her body , wrapped her in cloth, put her in a coffin and carried her to the nearest cemetery, where they buried her.

"I feel so bad. There's nothing for us. I cannot eat any more, I have nothing to drink," said Magda Cayo, Souvenir's sister. Her son Nicolas, wearing a Michael ­Jackson T-shirt, said the tentload of the Cayo family were making do by buying scraps of food and water whenever they could put together a dollar here, a dollar there. "I heard that Obama is sending a lot of things to Port-au-Prince. But we haven't seen any yet. Maybe they are on the way," he said.

In fact, the carnage has discriminated. On the outskirts of the city we drove past the US embassy, which stands solidly and squarely in its own estate, a statement of national pride of another sort. The building has not a scratch on its fine granite walls. Not a blade of grass is out of place in the lawn in front. Even earthquakes meet their match.